“I’ve done it all, everything they told me. I’ve traveled, I’ve been in love and I’ve been loved, I starved myself, I laughed at every joke, I got perfect grades and a bright future ahead of me. Enough. Enough of it. I’ll let the pills rearrange the chemicals in my brain. I’ll sit in the passenger's seat for a while and just watch the world go by.”

She calls this state “being underwater”. Her doctor calls it depression. Millennium Blue knows the definition of the word from the books on psychology stored in its memory. It prefers “underwater” though. It would be deadly for an electronic device to end up on the bottom of the ocean, but a computer knows no fear.

Millennium Blue dreams of the bottomless ocean. The pressure of the water and the absence of light. Screen flickering and going dark. Cords floating like black seaweed. Bubbles of air going up, up, up, disappearing in the endless blue above. Strangely, this image fills the computer's mechanical heart with a sense of peace.